"This stuff" is by far the most-discussed stuff on HN in the last couple months. Nothing else comes close.
Below, I've pasted a partial list. That's restricted to just muskdogeness and only the biggest threads. There are 25,000 comments in those threads alone.
How this translates into "the threads are silenced" and "people give up on commenting" is left as an exercise to the reader.
Yup, they're permaflagged and HN knowingly lets them go by even though they could do differently. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973. Seems exceedingly likely that this one too would've gotten auto-perma-flagged, but then a button was pushed to undo this as a one-off that is not applied to all these other cases. Of course @dang is free to prove us wrong and explain the discrepancy.
That's an underestimate though, since the list is far from comprehensive. Let's conservatively bump the number up to 40k comments. That's over 1000 comments a day and well over 10% of the total comments that have been posted to HN during this period.
From my perspective that's not the same as "letting it go by".
Hmm, that's interesting dang. I'm almost never seeing any 'muskdogeness' posts (nice name !) on the first page. I'm looking at new posts, with showdead = True.
Would you have a stat on all those posts, if they were flagged at some point, and then un-flagged later ?
I looked at the frontpage time of those 50 threads and it adds up to almost exactly 300 hours on the front page. That's a lot of hours.
But it was over a total time span of 900 hours, so still pretty easy to miss all 50 threads. This is the way the HN frontpage works: no one sees everything that makes the front page (not even us), and it's entirely possible to miss the largest threads and most-discussed topics.
For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973 is by now the second-largest thread in HN's history and spent 16 hours on the front page, but there are still going to be thousands of regular HN readers who never saw it, and some of those will probably feel angry about that and say that it has been "silenced" and "censored" and so on. That's the way this works.
Ultimately, it works that way because of fundamentals, meaning there's not much we can do about it. The solution is not to have 100 threads with 80k comments on the frontpage for 600 hours, instead of 50 threads with 40k comments for 300 hours, even though that's probably what most people who feel frustrated probably think they want. Rather the solution is to articulate the principles by which HN operates, and keep sticking to those principles over time.
I've been posting a ton about that in recent weeks, although (by the same dynamic I just described!) many readers won't yet have seen any of those posts. Here are two entry points:
